Month: April 2011

I am working on making a bass synth. It will be controlled by some old organ pedals, but currently it just works by adjusting pots.

In the schematics you can see the voltage regulator in the top left. I use 12volt DC in, from an old PC power supply. Which I regulate to 9 volts.

The 4093 contains four NAND gates with Schmidt triggers, and I use two of them. One controls the pitch of the sound, and the other controls the first one, by turning it on and off, so you get kind of an arpeggio. You can also turn that on and off with SW1.

The 4040 is a frequency divider, that is fed the output of the tone oscillator, and then each of the outputs of that is fed into two rotary switches. In that way you can mix together two octaves at the same time, getting a richer sound.

Most of this project was inspired by the book “Handmade electronic music”, by Nicolas Collins.

If you have any questions, or suggestions for improvements, please drop me a line.